More updates and clarifications…
On April 5th, the most common comment made to me in private was "I thought you were joking!" No, that's April 1st, and I made sure to make my announcement on the 3rd, one day before my birthday. (and, had that been a prank, it would have shown that I have a shitty sense of humor.) The birthday itself wasn't bad, and the day after, I dismantled the whole sales machine in about an hour. The web sites are gone, and by now, Amazon should have taken down all of my books. So if y'all thought that was a cheap ploy for attention to get more sales at Amazon, bang goes that theory too.
Looking at pingbacks, I note how some of you think I told all readers to fuck off. No. Some of you also think I'm mad because you never gave me a chance. No. If you never came to my blog until you heard that I told the world to fuck off, you don't qualify for the label "my readers," do you? No. That would be a specific label, which implies you had come to my site, picked out something that interested you, and then started reading. That is the only definition one can possibly take from "my readers," but almost all reporting parties chose to omit "my," which makes the story more sensational than it really is.
If you look at my genre, dark fiction, and decide I'm not for you, I'm cool with you. If you made it past the genre, but decided you didn't like the covers, or the blurbs, I'm cool with you. And if you read a free preview and decided not to keep reading, I'm cool with you. Because you have decided not to be one of my readers.
A few of my readers didn't get included either, but they know who they are. The readers who got omitted from the "Great Fuck-off of '11" are the people who put a link to my site on their blog, or who listed my blog in their blogroll. They posted a link to my latest book, or they left a rating on Smashwords or Amazon, or on WFG, or Muse's Success. They clicked the stars and left a rating on posts or sent me an email to say, "I finished this story, so here's what I thought." I never said support had to be sales, but a lot of these people also bought books too. Looking back at the last year, it was these kinds of readers who kept me going. They deserved a real apology for me backing out of the market, and I gave it to them.
I'm sure some of you have decided never to read me based on my blow up, and I don't care. You can't honestly say, "I was going to read you before I found out you was a bitch." Puh-lease, you were not. I write about gay mad scientists building private zombie hordes, transsexual halfling sexual predators touching their inner children inappropriately, and bigender shapeshifting bards involved in cloning scams. You don't wander much farther away from mainstream values without tattooing a swastika on your forehead and gibbering about the antichrist. So I really didn't expect that many of you to read my stuff in the first place. And, we are totally cool on that.
The rest of you can wander back to whatever genre you prefer, with my blessings. If you still want to feel offended on general principle, then you are a self-righteous cunt, and I really can't do anything for you one way or the other. So by all means, whine to your friends how I told you and the whole world to fuck off. It's not true, but then truth seems to possess a highly pliable quality these days.
